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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11089 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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Social technology is grossly inferior to medical technology. We couldn't shame or blame or diet away the obesity epidemic. Ozempic is doing what no amount of moralizing can.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine.

What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?

How prescient. Lucky that I've made my peace with never being as good as Scott. Well, I'm content with being the fourth best psychiatrist blogger on the internet. I can only name two who are better, but eh, humility is clearly my greatest strength.

Likewise I don't agree that we should just let them die from venereal disease but it should be doable to understand why some people feel that way.

I understand these people, on an intellectual level. I understand why schizophrenics are the way they are too, but I don't relate to them from a phenomenological perspective or like their actions.

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